Why I don't hate TERFs

I was out for a walk on a cold London Sunday morning earlier this year, equipped with my camera, approaching one of the strangest places in the world that I've ever been; London's Speakers Corner at Hyde Park. There, I saw what Orwell once described as "one of the minor wonders of the world", about a dozen disparate groups all eagerly and earnestly sharing their ideologies and views of the world. A man dressed in what I could only call cowboy clothing was passionately preaching his interpretation of the Gospel beneath an Israeli flag to a crowd of bemused Muslims, while metres away an Islamic preacher was doing the inverse.

Hecklers passing by would yell short quips, equally at the Islam followers as they would at the Christians. I witnessed one man get off his bicycle to give the Cowboy preacher a piece of his mind. After a few back and forths, as the cowboy preacher spoke down at him condescendingly from his perch on the stepladder he brought from home, I could see the man getting visibly upset.

I asked the man on the bike why he was so intent on arguing with the preacher, and he said to me, almost yelling, "You don't understand, they're always here, and you have to talk to them like that or they'll walk all over you".

Not long after, I noticed a young man passionately talking to a bunch of men and women covered in merch with the co-opted suffragette flag signalling their anti-trans views. He was passionately arguing for the rights of trans people while the anti-trans crew, surrounding him and outnumbering him 40:1, heckled him.

I walked over and stood next to him for a few minutes during this back and forth. Nobody was changing anyone's mind; and the young man was getting more and more frustrated – and the anti-trans crowd was enjoying this forty against one heckle-fest. So I placed my hand on his shoulder to give him some support and let him know that not everyone there was against him, and he looked up at me, towering over him at 6'2. He smiled, pointed up at me and proclaimed, "This is what a real woman looks like!".

Suddenly, I went from being the fly on the wall to being the most visible person there. Going from floating around for the past few hours and observing every strange group to instantly being heckled by every brainbroken anti-trans person in the vicinity. Someone who was previously streaming the cowboy preacher to far-right anti-islam campaigner Tommy Robinson's YouTube account swung his camera around to stream the commotion to 10,000 people, and Kellie Jay Keen – a few metres away – also heard the commotion and began to walk over.

"You're a man, you're a man", some of the elderly women in attendance started in a sing-songy tone. A quick incredulous retort of "Are you a child?" quickly caused them to stop and reflect on their actions.

The men, however, became far more aggressive. It turns out that it takes a particular kind of dangerous person to come out to a dreary park every Sunday and rant about trans people (and Islam).

No sooner than I sensed it was time to leave, did Kellie Jay Keen approach me, camera in hand – streaming to X.

My interaction with Kellie was unremarkable, except for her absurd sexual harassment, making strange sexual comments about my body.

I learned that day that these people have a strange passion for hate, not just hate for ideas and systems but for people; one that I am absolutely incapable of having. I find it kind of sad that these people had been radicalised in such a strange way, in a country where 24% of children live in poverty, imagine spending your time going to a hate rally against "paki doctors" and "trans rights activists".

What drives someone to hate

This experience intrigued me. I returned to my home in the UK to a phone exploding with anti-trans hate, death threats and deportation demands all directed at me from Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan's followers.

After an ill-advised evening engaging with some hateful messages on X, time spent all against my better judgment. I decided to research the people attending the rally. I wanted to know what caused these people to become like this? What broke their brains? What drives someone to be so filled with hate that they'd go to a rally on their Sunday only to yell at some people and talk absolute nonsense about Pakistanis and trans women?

Using some OSINT techniques for researching people, I quickly found the identity of a few attendees in the crowd, and one had a particularly open digital footprint.

The following is to the best of my knowledge, is the accurate story of Mary* with all identifying details changed for privacy.

Mary grew up in the West Midlands, falling in love with her high school sweetheart David*. It was a typical romance of the type, and they quickly got married only a few short years after finishing school.

Mary & David had a single child a few years later, but things went awful for them once COVID came along. She and her husband both took the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine in early 2022, and a few weeks after, her husband had an unexpected heart attack. Tragically, paramedics were not able to revive him at the scene.

He was survived by his wife and child.

Mary told her story to anyone who would listen, appearing on right-wing independent journalists' outlets, and soon found a community in the anti-vaccine crowd. The anti-vaccine crowd had a victim they could uphold and lovebomb, and Mary needed that love at that awful time in her life.

Nobody could blame Mary for joining the so-called freedom movement. So once the freedom rallies died down, and when one of her freedom friends invited her to an anti-trans rally, she, of course, started going.

This is not a unique story, just the most tragic I've come across. I've seen examples of people who previously had community in raw milk activism (which has mostly died off) seek community in anti-trans activism instead, or the pervasive example of someone who was criticised online by a trans person, embracing the love bombing of the TERF crowd.

A lot of people see it as a way of being social, and in a world where capitalism isolates us, takes our spaces and demands the commodification of everything, I can see how people still fall into this world of hate. It's so much easier than opening your eyes to the actual reality of this world we all share.

For so many anti-trans activists, they don't believe in this any more than they did the benefits of raw milk – they just are seeking community, like we all are.

But the difference is that when I go and gather around a table with the trans people I love in my life, I do that out of love and what unites us in common.

They instead do that out of hatred for us,
and that is so fucking sad.

Names, locations and other identifying details of individuals have been changed for privacy.